finished, he hugged Ashley Bell, the Col- lege Democrats' outgoing president-a soon-to-be-rising star, who is now run- ning for the Georgia State House-and exited the auditorium trailed by an adviser carrying a thick stack of business cards that read, "Booker Team for Newark." "Do you want to be President?" some- one asked him in the lobby: "I want to be mayor of Newark," Booker said. E vent fatigue sets in around Day Three. On Wednesday afternoon at the Four Seasons, the Convention's un- official boiler room, three Party digni- taries walked toward a private dining room on the second floor for a fund- raising lunch. "I hate to say it," one of them grumbled, "but I can't even re- member who it's for anymore. I've been to so many I've lost track." Late that night, at Avalon, a club across the street from Fenway Park, New York City Council Speaker Gifford Mil- ler, who is gearing up to run for mayor against Michael Bloomberg, arrived car- rying a stress-test card that he'd picked up at a fund-raising breakfast. "You put your thumb here and hold for ten seconds," he said, demonstrating. "Then you compare the colors." Miller's thumb left a greenish imprint, indicating "some stress." A Britney Spears look-alike began per- fonning onstage, alongside a male dancer. "What is this and when are we leaving?" Miller said. "This is a nightmare." Nearby, Eric Gioia, the city council- man and dispenser of Red Sox tickets, was still pumped up. He reflected on his position in the political firmament. "I don't want to be a representative for twenty years," he said. "I think I'm more suited to be an executive." -Ben McGrath THE WAYWARD PRESS BOSTON TERRIER A s many of their friends and neigh- bors fled to the Cape last week, the editors and columnists of the Boston Herald stayed in their locked-down and semi-deserted city to man the peanut 42 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 9 & 16, 2004 gallery: All week, the conservatIve tabloid heaped derision, abuse, and questionable scoops on the heads of the Democrats. Hardly had the delegates arrived when the Herald reported that one of the prospective platform speakers, Christie Vilsack, the First Lady of Iowa, had crit- icized the way blacks, Southerners, and Easterners speak. The next day; the Her- ald splashed the "news" that Teresa Heinz Kerry had referred to the Democratic Party as "putrid" and to Ted Kennedy as a "perfect bastard." And on Thursday; the day of John Kerry's speech, the Her- ald served up the front-page headline "KERRY GIRLS GONE WILD." According to the paper's gossip columnists, Alexan- dra and Vanessa Kerry were vying for the attention of the Boston-bred heartthrob Ben Affleck, who was turning up at every party in town. To be sure, none of these stories will be troubling the Pulitzer judges. Vilsack, a literacy advocate, made her comments about language, which the Herald quoted selectively; in a series of newspaper columns she wrote ten years ago. Heinz Kerry's remarks were even mustier; she made them in 1975, when she was married to the Republican John Heinz. The Boston Globe, a liberal broad- sheet that is part of the New York Times Company; didn't pick up on any of its rival's news breaks. In an editorial, it opined that the citizens of Boston were fortunate to witness "this incomparable show in all its sprawling, controversial, and inspiring magnificence" -an asser- tion that made Ken Chandler, the top editor at the Herald, laugh. "The Globe is a Times wannabe, but it can't quite pull it o " Chandler said last week, as he sat in his office. "We are just trying to extract some news from an event where there isn't any. We knew that the Globe was going to give it a big blow job. If I produced a newspaper as boring as the Globe, I'd kill myselE" Chandler, a tall, unflappable English- man, is in his second stint at the Herald, which he also edited in the eighties. Be- tween 1993 and 2002, he edited the New York Post. For many years, Rupert Murdoch owned both the Herald and the Post. In 1994, Murdoch sold the Heraldto one of his executives, PatrickJ. Purcell, who is still the publisher. When Chandler returned to the Herald last year, he brought with him some of the Post's rabble-rousing instincts. A pic- ture of John Kerry dressed like a con- dom during a visit to NASA appeared on the front page last week, with the cap- tion "Bubble Boy;" but the Convention speeches by Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and John Edwards were relegated to the paper's inside pages. Barack Obama, whose barnstorming address thrilled the delegates, was awarded four short para- graphs of copy-by the Associated Press. "Somebody's got to be the conserva- tive paper in this town," Chandler went on. "They don't make them more liberal than the Globe. Boston isn't a Republican place. On the other hand, people here are quite conservative, with a small 'c.' " Although the Globe is a much bigger, wealthier paper than the Herald, its strength lies in the suburbs. Inside the city limits, the Herald, which has a total circulation of about two hundred and fifty thousand, outsells the Globe on newsstands. If the Globe represents Bos- ton's desire to be taken seriously as a major center of art, commerce, and learn- ing, the Herald embodies some of its older traits: parochialism, truculence, and hostility toward anything it regards as showy or false. Martin Baron, the Globe's editor, re- acted angrily when told of Chandler's comments. "Our coverage of the Con- vention was lively; it was thorough. We covered the event. They hardly covered it at all. Folks at the Herald can bloviate all they want, but the truth is that a lot more people in this region buy the Globe than the Herald." As the ConventIon wound down, the Herald decided that the biggest story coming out of it was the lack of busi- ness around the Fleet Center ( "THANK$ FOR NOTHING, DNC. EMPTY EATERIES, EMPTY PROMISES"). By the end of the week, Howie Carr, the Herald's self-styled voice of the common man, was practi- cally ordering the Democrats home. "It is imperative to get these 5,000 free- loading delegates out of town before they discover the location of the nearest welfare office," Carr wrote. "These peo- ple are crazy: And cheap." On Friday morning, the headline on the Herald's front page read: "BOSTO- , NIANS, WHEREVER YOU ARE . . . IT S SAFE TO COME HOME." -John Cassidy